Rep. Aisha Wahab is right: America must talk to the Taliban

Rep. Aisha Wahab is right: America must talk to the Taliban

Kabul — Last month, when Aisha Wahab of California became the first Afghan-American elected to Congress, her victory was heralded as a sign that Afghans had truly made their mark in American society. Afghan social media was inundated with messages of pride and celebration, Western-funded diaspora media outlets rushed out “who is Aisha Wahab” pieces, and even former President Hamid Karzai congratulated the 38-year-old on her victory. But that celebration was short-lived. During an appearance on Democracy Now after her election, Wahab said the United States “should pursue diplomacy” with Afghanistan, “regardless of which group is in power.” Wahab acknowledged the severe limitations placed on women and girls under Taliban rule but said that, by exercising diplomacy with the Islamic Emirate government, the U.S. could possibly steer the Taliban “in the right direction when it comes to human rights, women’s rights and just civil rights across the board.” That interview led to immediate condemnation. A week after her victory, many of the same Afghans who were cheering her on turned against Wahab, labeling her a Taliban apologist and even leaking private photos of her and her family to social media. But here’s the thing: as much as the rest of the diaspora may hate to admit it, Wahab is correct. As an Afghan-American who has been living in Kabul since 2013, I have seen firsthand that the West’s efforts to punish the Taliban — seizing billions in Central Bank reserves, slashing foreign aid, closing embassies, cutting the nation’s banks off from the global financial system through financial restrictions — have greatly hurt the people, not the government. It’s not just me who says this, though. In 2023, Karen Decker, then chargé d'affaires of the U.S. mission to Afghanistan, told me Washington needed to pursue a policy of “pragmatic engagement” with the Taliban. As she put it, “isolation is ruinous. It's ruinous for the Afghan people. It's ruinous for the region.” The signs of that ruin are clear. At least 22 million Afghans, including 10.7 million women and girls, remain in need of humanitarian access. Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, that number has never been below 20 million, nearly half the population. And the unwillingness to engage with the Taliban authorities has only added to the pressures faced by the organizations trying to address the malnutrition, poverty, and displacement affecting tens of millions of Afghans. “Humanitarian actors have spent the last five years being the middlemen between the international community and the Taliban,”” Samira Sayed-Rahman, an Afghan-Canadian humanitarian worker, told me last month in the lead-up to the fifth anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal. International organizations, she said, have been left with the onus of negotiating access, exemptions to edicts and bans, and the space to implement programs. Under normal circumstances, she said, all of that would fall to the donors themselves. This was most clearly borne out in late 2022, when the Islamic Emirate banned Afghan women from working for NGOs, including the United Nations. It quickly became clear that negotiations were unavoidable, especially for smaller local organizations. Heads of local female-run organizations went to work to secure workarounds and exemptions while international organizations were in the middle of a shut down in protest. Eventually, even the international organizations were left with no choice but to talk. In the summer of 2023, Norwegian Refugee Council Secretary General Jan Egeland, confirmed his organization had “resumed most of our humanitarian operations in Kandahar as well as a number of other regions in Afghanistan.” Every other NGO leader I spoke to at the time, including Afghan women who ran smaller local organizations, said they chose to keep their workarounds quiet, worried the publicity would get the exemptions pulled. Those exemptions, along with the continued operation of unofficial schools for girls beyond the sixth grade, prove that though their leader may be stubborn and unmoving, there are more moderate forces within the Taliban. Pushing organizations to negotiate directly with the government, rather than leaving that to the donors, Sayed-Rahman added, isn’t a mere inconvenience. It can be dangerous, especially for Afghan nationals. It also asks apolitical organizations that were meant to hand out food, build schools, and run clinics to take on issues like girls’ access to education, women’s right to work, and educational curricula. The recent global aid cuts, including the 2025 gutting of USAID, have only made the situation more dire in Afghanistan, Flora Alexander, Executive Director of IRC UK, said after a week-long visit to the country. “There are currently multiple converging and overlapping crises” in Afghanistan, Alexander said, citing issues around climate change, the return of five million Afghans from Iran and Pakistan, and the continued challenges to education for women and girls. Alexander said a visit to a medical center in the eastern province of Nangarhar illustrated how important it is for Western countries to find ways to provide assistance to Afghanistan. “This used to be a full-service primary health facility covering malnutrition, mental health, communicable and non-communicable diseases. Today, it’s just reproductive health and family planning,” she said of the Khogyani district clinic. Most jarring for Alexander was the fact that it would only cost about $5,000 a month to restore the clinic to its former status. Alexander said there is an ongoing debate over how to address humanitarian needs without formally recognizing the government. This philosophical debate “is used as justification by some countries to not engage in humanitarian aid,” she said. However, she added, what these countries must realize is that providing assistance to health programs, for instance, is “a proven way of meeting health needs and ensuring that women can work and girls can continue to develop,” despite the Islamic Emirate’s restrictions. Further, the Taliban does want a relationship with the United States. This was made clear by both George W. Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan and the Islamic Emirate’s own Minister of Foreign Affairs, Amir Khan Muttaqi, who told the Financial Times that Washington is welcome to invest in Afghanistan $1 trillion in mineral assets. Most importantly, Muttaqi said sanctions and other restrictions on the Taliban leadership “did not achieve their intended objectives.” The biggest objection to engagement with the Islamic Emirate remains the serious human rights concerns in the country. Washington cited these, along with the charge that the Islamic Emirate is “a global terrorist organization” in their rebuke of Muttaqi’s offer, saying investment in mining would only enable the Taliban’s “horrific treatment” of the Afghan people. But the reality is that sanctions and diplomatic shunning have done little to disempower or dissuade the Taliban. Having seen the effects of international isolation with my own eyes, one thing has become clear: punishing the government has not worked. It has punished everyone but the government.